this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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The gaslighting bothers me the most. “The soft landing worked! The economy is great! Look at all these jobs!” Are they good jobs? Do they pay enough to live? Why has the price of everything gone up so much? It’s eerie being lied to on such a massive scale like this. Very much a superb example of “don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s raining.”
It's purposeful. The system is collapsing and the only option they have is to lie to people to convince them to continue participating.
"you now have to spend more money to survive" -> "people are now spending more money" -> "the GDP is going up" -> "the economy is doing well!"
If you are eating fast food and you give a shit if the price goes up you already lost.
The CPI is not the economy, the stock market is not the economy, wages and unemployment are not the economy, there is no one measure that effectively captures what's happening with the economy.
This exactly, and the people making policy are so far out of touch that they don't even have a friend of a friend that's as impacted as we are by this insane inflation.
Worst thing is, we weren't getting cost of living increases before inflation went batshit.
I mean, they are out of touch, but don't believe for a second that they don't know what they're doing.
For example, why would a politican regulate the housing market and bolster tenants' rights when they and a bunch of their buddies are making bank?
There is the Consumer Sentiment Index which at least tries to quantify what people are feeling about the economy. According to the recent report, 48% of consumers expect bad times in the year ahead for business conditions, which is down from the high of June 2022 when 79% of consumers expected challenging times ahead for the economy.
Index of Consumer Sentiment, 1960-2024 - University of Michigan
Oof
Source
Oof indeed. It's hard to think back to June 2022, but I'd have to imagine some of the sentiment increases are due to supply chain shortages getting worked out.
Personally as someone in tech, it feels like with interest rates going up, a lot of investments in technology companies have dried up. Looking back, mid 2010s was low interest rates and it seemed like there was more money being invested, without the focus of immediate profit. Now it feels like the screws are being tightened and every cent they can extract out of customers is being taken advantage of, regardless if that is overall good for the product or company.
Since the Great Depression (about a century ago!) The US government has been fudging the numbers so that the economy looks better than it is. Inflation, unemployment, wages, etc. are qualifed with modifiers (because why count anyone who stopped looking for work?).
The system intends to gaslight us and convince us the economy is doing great. We're down on our luck, or we suck and deserve to be on the brink of homelessness and starvation.
After all, if our government was transparent with us, we might see it's not all because of corporate greed and anticompetitive markets. We might realize regulatory capture has real consequences. We might pressure the government to actually serve the pubic and install some effective social safety nets. And then the companies would have to pay us living wages for short work weeks and provide a non-toxic, non-hazardous work environment.
And our plutocrats won't have that.
The "unemployment" calculation has enabled me to completely ignore any economic numbers from the federal government. If they'd make such a ridiculous assertion, the rest of the numbers must be completely fabricated.
Exactly. There may be a numerous jobs, but do they pay well?
The unemployment rate has plummeted ever since we started counting jobs per capita instead of employed individuals! It's been below -50% ever since!